All photos are courtesy of Wildrose.
For decades, Wildrose has sat at the corner of Pike and 11th, hosting everything from marriage equality rallies to jello wrestling for Seattle's lesbian scene. This week, the City officially proclaimed December 31 Wildrose Day—celebrating the 40th anniversary of the city’s last surviving lesbian bar.
When the bar opened in 1984, the Rose was part of a small Seattle girl-bar ecosystem: The Rose was the dive bar. It had plum and pink walls, big picture windows, and a healthy layer of stale beer on most surfaces. Their counterpoint was the Easy, the sexier, darker spot with red walls and no natural light.
But today, it's one of only 33 lesbian bars left in the whole US. The reason for those dwindling numbers is usually explained by two factors: First, queer femmes tend to earn less, and therefore have less disposable income than their gay male counterparts; second, lesbian bars, in essence, simply don't have enough space for gender fluidity and have a history of being trans exclusive.
Regarding the latter, most lesbian bars have started to acknowledge that they've always been—and should always be—more than just a femme queer space. The Germans (and The Lesbian Bar Project) call it the FLINTA umbrella: An acronym that stands for "female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, and agender." But that obviously doesn't change the money in the equation. Regarding the former, the Rose seems to have survived these last 40 years on grit alone. During the COVID lockdowns, Martha Manning, who has co-owned the bar with Shelley Brothers since 2001, joked: "We've been training for this."
"Over the years, we've been through some really hard stretches," she says. During lockdown, they sold taco kits, created merch, sold drinks to-go, and eventually launched a GoFundMe that raised almost $90,000 from their community. "It wasn't something we wanted to do, but it was, as it turned out, it was what kept the doors open.”
Today, the bar looks like a combination of its dive bar roots and the late Easy, with its red walls and towering, carved bar. Ultimately, though, the Rose is built on a scaffolding of oral history: How Ani DiFranco came to their open mics in the ’80s; that Brandi Carlile played their Pride events twice, and she wasn’t even the headliner either time; how they discovered the massive, ornate bar tucked behind a drop ceiling.
But one bit of lore rose to the top this week: On a VHS tape from 2000, a server told the story of an older woman who walked into the bar, leaning on a cane. “As she stepped through the door, I thought, ‘Oh, she is so in the wrong place.’” She sat down at a table and ordered a club soda with a twist. “To my disbelief, she winked as she said it, and not like somebody’s old auntie.” The woman asked the server if she knew “what this place was” and patted the seat next to her. The server puffed herself up, prepared to explain what a dyke bar was to this woman. Instead, she got a little history. “I would come to this bar in the '20s,” she said, which was long before it was the Wildrose. “And this is where the girls could be with each other, ya know?” She went on to explain that, where there’s now just a thin line of molding on the wall, was once a balcony. “There were little tables we would sit at,” she said. “And you would say whatever your drink was with a twist. And that meant you were the kinda gal that wanted to be with other gals.”
Manning can get bogged down in the minutia of running the bar, but when we asked what it was like to steward a bar with that much history, she lit up. She says her wife, Katy Cooper, who has helped run the bar for the last few years, reminded her of how important the bar is. "You lose sight, you get jaded, and it beats you up," she said. "She reminded me that it's really important to a lot of people."
The community has a complicated relationship with the bar, she acknowledges. "It's love-hate. And I get that, because I [can feel that way], too," she says. "But also, it brought me my wife, my best friends and the people that work here really care about this stuff here, and so I love them, and I don't want to let them down."
It reminded her of one more piece of the bar's oral history: A handful of years ago, during the marriage equality fight, Mary Lambert came into the bar, and she reminded Manning that years before, she had served her. "When she came in, it was her first gay bar, and she was very nervous. I was bartending, and I had time, so I drew a map of some other queer spaces around that I thought she might like," she says. Lambert still remembered that gesture years later. "I hope I can do that for people when it's their first time."
Tonight, the bar is celebrating all of that history with a party, starting at 6 pm and going til the cows come home.
We'll start with this one: The famous Dykes on Bikes. For years, they would line their bikes up outside the bar, especially during Pride weekend, and pop in for a drink or a bite. I trust they were treated like the celebrities they are.
And the list doesn't end with Brandi: Ani DiFranco famously played a set in the back room, Gossip played during Pride on year, and drag star Ben DeLaCrème used to tend bar.
